Everything must be easy, effortless and stress-free. ‘Frictionless’.

Customers might like what you have to offer but if it involves too much time and hassle, they will look elsewhere.

Making it easy for customers involves a comprehensive focus on the entire customer experience including, website, call centre, IT, knowledge management, staffing, processes and procedures and more.

Customer service staff need to understand this customer journey and play their part in making it as quick and easy as possible. On a personal level, customer service staff should always be trying to make it easy for the customer – always looking for opportunities to save time and eliminate hassle.

Here are some tips:

Reduce wait times and time on task

Every minute that a customer waits for service, or must spend more time on buying tasks, detracts from the experience. Effective organisations and customer staff both analyse the customer journey to identify delays in the buying process and constantly think on their feet for ways to reduce to the time costs in the buying process.

Questions to ask include:

• What is causing the delay?
• How can I address the cause of the delay (investment / process change / streamlining?)
• How can I personally save the customer time? (complete the form? find the product myself)

Limit choices to a manageable number

Choice is good but confusion is bad.

Offering people too many choices, especially if they don’t fully understand the choices, can make the buying process simply too stressful. Too hard.

Simplify the choice by:

• Offering fewer, better choices
• Offering choices, progressively, in simpler stages, such as in menu systems on websites or computers. Choose from within one category (model?), then another (size?), then another (colour?) rather than listing 28 options at once.
• Help the client make the choice through informed questioning and relevant recommendations

Streamline the customer journey

• Do you really understand what your customers go through to buy your product?
• Where do they spend their time? What parts are easy, and which stressful?
• Have you considered your website, phone availability, parking, staffing, forms, lead times, invoicing, guarantees, advice, reliability and more?

To really ensure your offering is easy to buy, you need to first understand the buying process and potential friction points – so you can then make changes and investments where necessary.

Whether you take a common-sense approach to this task or adopt complex process-mapping methodologies such as Lean Six Sigma, try to identify the pressure points and bottlenecks that are frustrating your customers.

Stop the silly mistakes

When looking at the customer journey, don’t just think of the best-case scenario when everything goes smoothly.

Where do problems and delays typically occur? Where could they occur? And what are you going to do about it?

Don’t be the problem

And finally, have you considered how you might be a cause of friction rather than helping people.

Contact and communication are great but we’ve also all experienced the over-attentive wait staff and the pushy, needy sales staff.

Effective customer service involves knowing when to offer assistance and when to back off and let people buy at their own pace.

Train your team to understand the customer journey so that they understand the pressure points and help remove the friction for your customers.

– Giles